Abstract:

‘The Place of Time’ uses choreography, writing, composition and improvisation to weave a performance around movement, sound and text. It reveals the interdependence of each source and their points of departure. Jo Breslin and Martin Leach (DMU), and Christopher Foster (University of Wolverhampton) play with the time and place in which things may happen. Between the deadpan, the wry, and the expressive ‘The Place of Time’ becomes a question about the performance of a reality that is not what it seems.
The performance borrows its title and some of its themes from an essay by Peter Galinson.* Between 1902 and 1909 Einstein worked in the Bern patent office as a technical expert evaluating electromagnetic patents concerning the regulation of time in multiple locations. To assess these documents Einstein and his colleagues
stood at wooden podiums on which they examined the papers. By 1905 Einstein had produced his own papers establishing the particle theory of light (for which he received the Nobel Prize) and his Special Theory of Relativity. This performance takes as its starting point Einsteinʼs working situation in the Bern office as he pondering the ontology of simultaneity standing at his podium. It uses the notion of relational pathways and the interconnectedness of time and space to play with simple movement in the context of a process-based musical composition and a text exploring Heideggerian ideas of
being.
* Peter Galinson (2000) Einsteinʼs Clocks: The Place of Time, Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2, (Winter 2000) pp.355–389